As part of its plan to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, the Obama administration is targeting the dairy industry to reduce methane emissions in their operations.

This comes despite falling methane emission levels across the economy since 1990.

The White House has proposed cutting methane emissions from the dairy industry by 25 percent by 2020. Although U.S. agriculture only accounts

for about 9 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, it makes up a sizeable portion of methane emissions — which is a very potent greenhouse gas.

Some of these methane emissions come from cow flatulence, exhaling and belching — other livestock animals release methane as well.

“Cows emit a massive amount of methane through belching, with a lesser amount through flatulence,” according to How Stuff Works. “Statistics vary regarding how much methane the average dairy cow expels. Some experts say 100 liters to 200 liters a day… while others say it’s up to 500 liters… a day. In any case, that’s a lot of methane, an amount comparable to the pollution produced by a car in a day.”

“Of all domestic animal types, beef and dairy cattle were by far the largest emitters of [methane],” according to an EPA analysis charting greenhouse gas emissions in 2012. Cows and other animals produce methane through digestion, which ferments the food of animals.

“During digestion, microbes resident in an animal’s digestive system

ferment food consumed by the animal,” the EPA notes. “This microbial fermentation process, referred to as enteric fermentation, produces [methane] as a byproduct, which can be exhaled or eructated by the animal.”

It’s not just the dairy industry that the Obama administration is clamping down on. The White House

is looking to regulate methane emissions across the economy from agriculture to oil and gas operations — all this despite methane emissions falling 11 percent since 1990.

Methane emissions have largely been reduced because of the incentive for companies

to capture it and sell it for monetary gain. Oil and gas companies, for example, have been looking for ways to increasingly capture methane leaked from drilling operations which they can then sell.

“The industry has led efforts to reduce emissions of methane by developing new technologies and equipment, and recent studies

show emissions are far lower than EPA projected just a few years ago,” said Howard Feldman, head of scientific and regulatory affairs at the American Petroleum Institute. “Additional regulations are not necessary and could have a chilling effect on the American energy renaissance, our economy, and our national security.”

“Methane is natural gas that operators can bring to the market

,” he added. “There is a built-in incentive to capture these emissions.”

Environmentalists have been pushing the Obama administration to crack down on methane emissions for some time, arguing that they drive global warming and pollute the air and water. Activists have argued that the methane leakage rate

from natural gas operations is 50 percent higher than the EPA estimates.

“President Obama’s plan to reduce climate-disrupting methane pollution is an important step in reining in an out of control industry exempt from too many public health protections,” Deborah Nardone, campaign director

of the Sierra Club’s Keeping Dirty Fuels in the Ground campaign. “However, even with the most rigorous methane controls and monitoring in place, we will still fall short of what is needed to fight climate disruption if we do not reduce our reliance on these dirty fossil fuels.”

Republicans and the oil and gas industry argue that the methane leakage rate has been estimated to be 50 times lower than the EPA’s estimate. The GOP argues that the EPA’s estimate is simply an attack on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

“The EPA has been on a witch hunt to shut down hydraulic fracturing, and yet again the evidence doesn’t back up their excessive claims,” said Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter. “All too often we see the Agency using flawed science for political purposes, but this report – partially funded by environmental activists no less – shows EPA’s emissions estimates from hydraulic fracturing are way off.”

Why Don’t I have a good feeling about this? Ever notice the ones that declare an area safe never live there, Just A thought??

Posted: 03/27/2014 2:50 pm EDT Updated: 03/27/2014 2:59 pm EDT

March 11 was the third anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear incident, where cleanup efforts to contain radioactive contamination continue. In a reminder that such problems are not limited to Japan but a worldwide concern, on February 14 the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant facility near Carlsbad, New Mexico, admitted that their first radiation leak in 15 years exposed 17 WIPP workers to radiation, who inhaled plutonium and americium particles. No Threat, hnnn

The Carlsbad WIPP is one of the world’s three deep repositories and the only one in the U.S. for storing nuclear waste left over from the production and testing of atomic weapons, burying the radioactive waste more than a third of a mile underground in tunnels hewn out of salt beds. The Carlsbad WIPP has received up to 212,000 cubic feet of nuclear waste a year since it opened in 1999. It stores waste from U.S. nuclear labs and weapons production facilities. New Mexican state law regulates hazardous waste facilities and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allows New Mexico to issue federal permits for the storage of hazardous waste. Nuclear Waste Partnership LLC manages the site.

The problem of the safe storage of nuclear waste has a long history, dating back to the World War 2 Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic weapons, when transuranic (TRU) waste began accumulating. In the 1950s, the National Academy of Sciences recommended deep disposal of long-lived TRU radioactive wastes in geologically stable formations such as deep salt beds. Throughout the 1960s, U.S. government scientists sought an appropriate site for TRU radioactive waste disposal, eventually focusing on a desert region of southeastern New Mexico where, 250 million years earlier, the evaporation of an ancient Permian Sea had created a 2,000-foot-thick salt bed.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy:
Bedded salt is free of fresh flowing water, easily mined, impermeable and geologically stable; an ideal medium for permanently isolating long-lived radioactive wastes from the environment. However, its most important quality in this application is the way salt rock seals all fractures and naturally closes all openings.

As for the nature of the radioactive debris stored at the site, in its WIPP webpage the U.S. Department of Energy notes:
WIPP is the nation’s only repository for the disposal of nuclear… waste. It consists of clothing, tools, rags, residues, debris, soil and other items contaminated with small amounts of plutonium and other man-made radioactive elements. Disposal of transuranic waste is critical to the cleanup of Cold War nuclear production sites. Waste from DOE sites around the country is sent to WIPP for permanent disposal. TRU waste is categorized as “contact-handled” or “remote-handled” based on the amount of radiation dose measured at the surface of the waste container. Contact-handled waste has a radiation dose rate not greater than 200 millirem (mrem) per hour, while remote-handled waste can have a dose rate up to 1,000 rem per hour. About 96 percent of the waste to be disposed at WIPP is contact-handled.

The underground storage facility is closed until all testing is complete and they determine out the source of the radiation leak.

The Carlsbad WIPP incident is not New Mexico’s first radiation leak, accident or spill. In 1979, four months after the Three Mile Island accident, New Mexico experienced a high level spill when a breached dam at a uranium mill operated by the United Nuclear Corporation dumped 94 million gallons of effluent and 1,000 tons of acidic radioactive sludge into the Rio Puerco. The “Church Rock Spill” was eventually declared an EPA Superfund site in 1983 after the New Mexico Governor at the time objected to the Navajo Nation’s request that it be named a federal disaster.

What is certain is that pressure nationwide from the nuclear industry for more facilities similar to WIPP will continue to deal with spent fuel rods from over 100 nuclear facilities around the country, with the industry urging that the long delayed Yucca Mountain repository be funded, finished and fuel recycling initiated there.

On March 20, Energy Department spokesman Brad Bugger said, “We are doing ongoing monitoring of air, soil, water and vegetation, and we are seeing nothing that indicates any health impacts to workers, the public or the environment.”

Local residents are not so sure. Seeking to allay local fears, on March 12 Jose R. Franco, manager of the U.S. Department of Energy Carlsbad Field Office wrote to Eddy and Lea County residents, noting “I have made every aspect of our operations at WIPP open and available to the investigation team” before adding, “I was recently interviewed by a reporter who asked me if I thought WIPP would ever reopen. I told him that WIPP has to reopen, and it will reopen as a safer and stronger operation than it has ever been.”

In the interim, Nuclear Waste Partnership LLC will ship TRU radioactive waste from the federal Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to a dump in Andrews County, Texas, which is operated by Waste Control Specialists LLC.

At a hospital in Pittsburgh, surgeons are now allowed to place patients into a state of suspended animation. If a patient arrives with a traumatic injury, and attempts to restart their heart have failed — if they’re on the doorstep of death — they will have their blood replaced with a cold saline solution, which stops almost all cellular activity. At this point, the patient is clinically dead — but if the doctors can fix the injury within a few hours, they can be returned to life from suspended animation by replacing the saline with blood.

Or at least, that’s the theory. The technique of suspended animation (or “emergency preservation and resuscitation” as non-sci-fi doctors prefer to call it) was first trialed on pigs in 2002. Hasan Alam, working with his colleagues at the University of Michigan Hospital, drugged up a pig, created a massive hemorrhage to simulate the effect of a massive gunshot wound, and then replaced its blood with a cold saline solution, cooling the pig’s cells to just 10 Celsius (50F). After the injury was treated, the pig was gradually warmed back up by replacing the saline with blood. Usually the pig’s heart started beating on its own, and despite the pig being dead for a few hours, there was no physical or cognitive impairment. Now, it’s time to try it out on humans. [Research paper: dx.doi.org/10.1067/msy.2002.125787 – “Learning and memory is preserved after induced asanguineous hyperkalemic hypothermic arrest in a swine model of traumatic exsanguination”]

Roughly once a month, UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh receives a patient who has suffered a cardiac arrest after some kind of traumatic injury (gunshot, stabbing, etc.), and hasn’t responded to normal methods of restarting their heart. Because there’s currently no other kind of treatment, and because these kinds of wounds are nearly always fatal, the surgeons don’t need consent to carry out the suspended animation. The technique will be used on 10 patients, with the outcome compared against 10 people who didn’t. Samuel Tisherman, the surgeon who is leading the trial, told New Scientist that they’ll then refine their technique and try it out on 10 more patients — at which point, there should be enough data to work out whether suspended animation is worth rolling out to other hospitals.

The process is much the same for humans as it was for pigs. The first step is to replace all of the blood in the heart and brain — the two areas most sensitive to hypoxia — with with cold saline. Then, the saline is pumped around the rest of the body. After 15 minutes, the patient’s temperature reaches 10C — they have no blood, no brain activity, and they’re not breathing. Technically they’re dead — but because the metabolism of your cells slow down at low temperatures, they can survive for a few hours using anaerobic respiration (usually it’s just a few minutes). ”We’ve always assumed that you can’t bring back the dead. But it’s a matter of when you pickle the cells,” said Peter Rhee, who helped developed the suspended animation technique.

In the TV show Fringe, they cryogenically freeze a head… then thaw it and reattached it to a body.

For now, this process is only being used for cardiac arrests following traumatic injuries, but in the future Tisherman says he hopes to use the technique for other conditions as well. The other big question, of course, is whether this technique can be used to suspend animation for more than just a couple of hours. If I have my blood replaced with saline, and then use cryonics to cool my body down yet further, could I be “dead” for a few months or weeks or years before being warmed up again? If sci-fi has taught us anything, it’s that suspended animation (or stasis as it’s sometimes called) is one of the most potentially exciting technologies.

not only for rich people trying to extend their lives, but for the possibly centuries-long journeys that our first interstellar explorers will embark upon.

The data that National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden holds could, if released, lead to deaths, the agency’s outgoing director says.

Gen. Keith Alexander said in an interview aired Tuesday on “Special Report with Bret Baier” that the possibility that more information coming from Snowden could cost people their lives represents his “greatest concern.”

“Do you know what he has?” host Baier asked the general.

“We have a good assessment of what he has, yes,” Alexander said.

“And is there a lot more damaging to come?”

“Yes, especially to our military operations and those who are serving overseas,” Alexander replied.

Alexander said he was “hugely disappointed” when he learned that Snowden, who was entrusted with sensitive information, began leaking NSA data last summer.

“I think this will haunt him for the rest of his life,” Alexander said. “Here’s a young guy who made some huge mistakes.”

When asked what he would do with Snowden were he granted 15 minutes alone with him, Alexander said he wouldn’t attack the former analyst, but instead might reveal to him the damage he’s caused the agency, “so he knows the damage — the significant damage to our nation and to our allies.”

Alexander also said the reforms pushed by President Obama, which would require the NSA to prove more direct links from terrorists before acquiring data from telephone companies, are sensible.

“The approach that we put forward … is one that would limit what we get, so it does away with the business record FISA database as we know it today, and we would now work with the telecommunications company on specific numbers that have a terrorist nexus and get only that data,” Alexander said. “This is an approach that I think meets the intent of protecting our civil liberties and privacy and the security of this country.”

Also in the interview, Alexander addressed concerns raised by former President Carter, who on Sunday said he uses snail mail to communicate with foreign leaders for fear his emails are being monitored.

“We’re not [monitoring the emails],” Alexander said. “So he can now go back to writing emails. The reality is, we don’t do that. And if we did, it would be illegal and we’d be … held accountable and responsible.”

BEIJING – A Malaysian team have told relatives of Chinese passengers on board the missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH370 that there was sealed evidence that cannot be made public, as they came under fire from the angry relatives at a briefing on Wednesday.

The sealed evidence included air traffic control radio transcript, radar data and airport security recordings.

The briefing at the Metropark Lido Hotel in Beijing focused on UK satellite analysis which led Malaysia to conclude that flight MH370 ended in south Indian Ocean, off Perth.

The Chinese relatives were told that a five-member high-level team from Malaysia plans to brief them once every five days. The team include MAS pilot Lim Jit Koon and senior civil aviation official Ahmad Nizar Zolfakar.

During the question-and-answer session, a relative said: “Thanks for demonstrating your ability to read every word out of the powerpoint slides.”

Another asked: “If the info is from UK satellite firm Inmarsat, does it mean the Malaysia team cannot answer our questions on the MH370 analysis?”

Faced with the barrage of questions from the angry relatives, the MAS team replied: “We can answer but we might not be correct as we’re not the investigators”:

They said Malaysia had requested for the British experts to join them for the briefing in Beijing but the latter declined.

They assured the relatives that the search and rescue operations for the plane have been stepped up but the hunt has been challenging as the search area is huge.

The Malaysian government and MAS have been criticised for their handling of the disappearance of MH370 on March 8. They have been accused of being slow in disseminating information and not revealing everything about the incident.

Prime Minister Najib Razak said on Monday night that based on latest UK data analysis, the plane had gone down in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean.

“We demand you retract announcement that MH370 ended in south Indian Ocean and continue search-and-rescue operations,” one relative said at the briefing.

Some family representatives targeted Malaysian envoy Iskandar Sarudin, asking him: “You expect us to accept a report you cannot defend?”

“No comment,” said Mr Iskandar.

He again declined to comment when asked “how do you expect us to feel friendly towards Malaysia?”

Upset by the response from the Malaysia team, a relative said: “You have once again left us speechless!”

Wednesday’s briefing was the first time the media were allowed to attend.

The relatives also accused MAS of not providing enough assistance to them.

“Two-thirds of MH370 passengers are Chinese but only 50 caregivers?” asked a relative.

An airline official explained that they have had problem finding volunteers to help out.

When asked why the MAS office at the hotel was closed on Tuesday, the MAS officials said they were advised by the Chinese government not to be there given the tense mood among the relatives.

Jakarta (ANTARA News) – The Agency of Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT) required at least 15 airplane to optimally implement the weather modification technology across Indonesia, an official said here on Wednesday.

“We now have only five airplane, three of which are available for weather modification. The other two are rented out for pioneer flight service,” Head of the Technical Management Unit of Artificial Rain of the BPPT Heru Widodo said here at a press conference on Wednesday.

According to Widodo, the weather modification technology should cover all the regions in Indonesia, which are divided into western, central and eastern.

Five airplane per region was enough for optimal weather modification in the region, Widodo said.

“Four aircraft are on standby for operations, while one or two is used for research,” he added.

Unfortunately, BPPT only has five airplane currently, four Casa C-212 and one Piper Cheyenne.

The Agency had to rent out two of their planes due to the high cost of maintenance, Widodo said.

“It depends on the government policy, we already have the technology. If we can combine the two, it is hoped that food, energy and disaster related issues can be reduced in Indonesia,” Widodo said.

Weather modification technology has been widely used to avert floods in Jakarta and several regions in Java and also to reduce hotspots or forest fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan islands.

Meanwhile, a researcher of the Science and Atmosphere Technology Center of The National Aeronautics and Space Agency (LAPAN), Didi Satiadi, said Indonesia had extreme meteorology.

Most of the disasters in the country were hydro-meteorological disasters, which were caused by heavy rain, floods, landslides, whirlwind and droughts. However, the geologic disasters were responsible for the largest number of victims.

Science and technology can be applied to mitigate disasters, such as for understanding and predicting extreme weather.

“Furthermore, technology can be used to create an Indonesia that is weather-ready,” he said.

In just one decade, the Internet will be a “seamless part of how we live our everyday lives,” according to a new report from the Pew Research Internet Project. Or it could be the means to a “very dystopian world that is also profoundly inegalitarian.” The possible scenarios were based on the prognostications of thousands of experts on science and the Web, including Joe Touch, director of the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute. “The Internet will shift from the place we find cat videos to a background capability that will be a seamless part of how we live our everyday lives. We won’t think about ‘going online’ or ‘looking on the Internet’ for something – we’ll just be online, and just look,” he said. But another perspective comes from John Markoff, senior writer for the Science section of the New York Times.

“What happens the first time you answer the phone and hear from your mother or a close friend, but it’s actually not, and instead, it’s a piece of malware that is designed to social engineer you?” he asked.

“What kind of a world will we have crossed over into? I basically began as an Internet utopian (think John Perry Barlow), but I have since realized that the technical and social forces that have been unleashed by the microprocessor hold out the potential of a very dystopian world that is also profoundly inegalitarian. I often find myself thinking, ‘Who said it would get better?,’” said Markoff.

The report by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie was done in conjunction with Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center. It canvassed hundreds of experts about the future “of such things as privacy, cybersecurity, the ‘Internet of Things’ and net neutrality.” “In this case we asked experts to make their own predictions about the state of digital life by the year 2025,” the authors said. Striking patterns were found in the responses of nearly 2,600 experts and technology builders, they wrote.

“These experts foresee an ambient information environment where accessing the Internet will be effortless and most people will tap into it so easily it will flow through their lives ‘like electricity.’” The experts predict “mobile, wearable, and embedded computing will be tied together in the Internet of Things, allowing people and their surroundings to tap into artificial intelligence-enhanced cloud-based information storage and sharing.” The report cited Dan Lynch, founder of Interop and former director of computing facilities at SRI International, writing “the most useful impact is the ability to connect people.” “From that, everything flows,” Lynch writes.

Business models for finance, entertainment, publishing and education will be destroyed and rebuilt, and the “physical and social realms” will be mapped, the report said. “These experts expect existing positive and negative trends to extend and expand in the next decade, revolutionizing most human interaction, especially affecting health, education, work, politics, economics, and entertainment.” Most experts believe “the results of that connectivity will be primarily positive.”

“However, when asked to describe the good and bad aspects of the future they foresee, many of the experts can also clearly identify areas of concern, some of them extremely threatening. Heightened concerns over interpersonal ethics, surveillance, terror, and crime, may lead societies to question how best to establish security and trust while retaining civil liberties,” the report said. The responses grouped themselves into several categories, including eight that were “hopeful” and several that were thought to be “concerned.”

“Devices will more and more have their own patterns of communication, their own ‘social networks,’ which they use to share and aggregate information, and undertake automatic control and activation,” said David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. “More and more, humans will be in a world in which decisions are being made by an active set of cooperating devices. The Internet (and computer-mediated communication in general) will become more pervasive but less explicit and visible. It will, to some extent, blend into the background of all we do.”

Several strongly hinted at increasing globalism.

“It will be a world more integrated than ever before. We will see more planetary friendships, rivalries, romances, work teams, study groups and collaborations,” wrote Bryan Alexander, senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education. More information, including details, will be handy, and that will result in a new view on life, said Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Societ

“We’ll have a picture of how someone has spent their time, the depth of their commitment to their hobbies, causes, friends, and family. This will change how we think about people, how we establish trust, how we negotiate change, failure, and success,” she said.

Data layers will be what filters a view of the world, said Daren Brabham, of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC. “This will change a lot of social practices, such as dating, job interviewing and professional networking, and gaming, as well as policing and espionage.”

More uprisings, too, will develop because more people will be aware of what others have regarding health care, water, education, food and human rights, said Nicole Ellison of the School of Information at Michigan.

Borders will disappear because they simply won’t matter.

The report said more than 7 billion “humans on this planet will sooner or later be ‘connected’ to each other and fixed destinations, via the Uber (not Inter) net.”

“When every person on this planet can reach, and communicate two-way, with every other person on this planet, the power of nation-states to control every human inside its geographic boundaries may start to diminish,” said David Hughes, an Internet pioneer.

Networks will network with networks, and Hal Varian, chief economist for Google, said there will be universal access to all human knowledge. But Llewellyn Kriel, CEO of TopEditor International Media Services, noted that access to knowledge and information isn’t always good.

“Everything – every thing – will be available online with price tags attached. Cyber-terrorism will become commonplace. Privacy and confidentiality of any and all personal will become a thing of the past. Online ‘diseases’ – mental, physical, social, addictions (psycho-cyber drugs) – will affect families and communities and spread willy-nilly across borders. The digital divide will grow and worsen beyond the control of nations or global organizations such as the U.N. This will increasingly polarize the planet between haves and have-nots. Global companies will exploit this polarization. Digital criminal networks will become realities of the new frontiers. Terrorism, both by organizations and individuals, will be daily realities. The world will become less and less safe, and only personal skills and insights will protect individuals,” he said.

Big Brother can’t be far behind then.

“Governments will become much more effective in using the Internet as an instrument of political and social control. That is, filters will be increasingly valuable and important, and effective and useful filters will be able to charge for their services. People will be more than happy to trade the free-wheeling aspect common to many Internet sites for more structured and regulated environments,” suggested Paul Babbitt, an associate professor at Southern Arkansas University.

Eventually, it will push some people beyond the boundaries of reality, said Bob Briscoe, chief researcher in networking for British Telecom.

“More people will lose their grounding in the realities of life and work, instead considering those aspects of the world amenable to expression as information as if they were the whole world,” he said. “Given there is strong evidence that people are much more willing to commit petty crimes against people and organizations when they have no face-to-face interaction, the increasing proportion of human interactions mediated by the Internet will continue the trend toward less respect and less integrity in our relations.”

Marc Rotenberg, of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said: “I hope there will be greater openness, more democratic participation, less centralized control, and greater freedom. But there is nothing predetermined about that outcome. Economic and political forces in the United States are pulling in the opposite direction. So, we are left with a central challenge: will the Internet of 2025 be – a network of freedom and opportunity or the infrastructure of social control?”

Ron Paul: ‘We’re in a Revolutionary Stage’

CNSNews.com) – As government gets bigger, it strays further from its central mission of protecting Americans’ liberty, former Texas congressman and presidential hopeful Ron Paul told Fox News’s Neil Cavuto on Wednesday.

“[E]ventually, we will have to wake up and decide what the role of government ought to be in this country,” Paul said. Right now, he said the government uses the excuse of “fairness” or “safety” to take care of people — believing that “people aren’t smart enough to do this.

“So, we have accepted as a nation a role for government which was never intended by our Constitution and was never intended in a free society. So, in a way, we’re in a revolutionary stage,” Paul said.

“We either have to change that (the role of government) or we’re going to continue to go downhill. This is one of the reasons why the economy is in stagnation, because nobody is giving up on the status quo. How many bureaus or agencies of government ever get truly repealed? No, it’s a continuing expansion and dependency.

“And now people think they have a right to all this. They don’t think that, you know, you and I might be paying taxes and, therefore, they are getting some temporary benefits, and thank you. They have an absolute right, a demand. A need becomes a right. And really in a free society, you have a right to your life and you ought to have the right to keep the fruits of (your) labor.”

Despite “the mess that we have created,” Paul said he still holds out hope that a younger generation “will come along and say, hey look, we can’t depend on the government to take care of us, and we don’t need all this mischief overseas. So, we need something new and different.”

Paul said his message of limited government and individual liberty resonates with these young people who have worked hard, graduated from college, borrowed a lot of money, and now can’t find a job.

Lithium-ion batteries have caused 140 mid-air incidents in last 20 years

The devices are commonly used in mobile phones and laptops

Classed as dangerous by The International Civil Aviation Organisation

Reignites theory that missing flight may have crashed after on-board fire

Aviation expert said it re-affirm belief that flames started in cargo hold

One cargo plane crashed in 2010 after attempting an emergency landing

Safety report said battery caught fire and filled the flight deck with smoke

highly flammable lithium batteries

Malaysian Airlines today confirmed that flight MH370 had been carrying highly flammable lithium-ion batteries in its cargo hold, re-igniting speculation that a fire may have caused its disappearance.

The admission by CEO Ahmad Jauhari comes four days after he denied the aircraft was carrying any dangerous items and nearly two weeks after the plane went missing.

He said the authorities were investigating the cargo, but did not regard the batteries as hazardous – despite the law dictating they are classed as such – because they were packaged according to safety regulations.

The revelation has thrown the spotlight back on the theory that the Boeing 777 may have been overcome by a fire, rendering the crew and passengers unconscious after inhaling toxic fumes.

Lithium-ion batteries – which are used in mobile phones and laptops – have been responsible for a number of fires on planes and have even brought aircraft down in recent years.

Malaysian Airlines today confirmed that missing MH370 (pictured on an earlier flight) had been carrying highly flammable lithium-ion batteries in its cargo hold four days after denying it had any dangerous goods on board, highly flammable lithium batteries

According to US-based Federal Aviation Administration, lithium-ion batteries carried in the cargo or baggage have been responsible for more than 140 incidents between March 1991 and February 17 this year, it was reported by Malaysiakini.

In rare cases, aircraft have been destroyed as a result of fires started from the devices, although they have been cargo planes in both incidents.

In one case, UPS Airlines Flight 6 crashed while attempting an emergency landing in September 2010 en route from Dubai to Cologne in Germany.

Flight MH370 disappeared from radar screens two weeks ago on March 8 after taking off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing.

The second day of a new search, concentrating on a desolate area in the southern Indian Ocean, failed to locate two possible pieces of debris from the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777.

Aircraft and ships scoured the seas around 2,500kilometres off the coast of the Australian city of Perth, for 10 hours before darkness fell. Australian officials have vowed to continue the search tomorrow.

Billie Vincent, the former head of security for the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, said the revelation re-affirmed his belief that flames started in the cargo hold, destroying the aircraft’s communication systems then filling the cabin with toxic fumes.

This, he says, would have overwhelmed the passengers but may have given the pilots a chance to divert the aircraft for an emergency landing.

He told Air Traffic Management: ‘The data released thus far most likely points to a problem with hazardous materials.

As the planet warms, the temperatures that trigger spring arrive earlier. But not everything’s adjusting on the same schedule. Flowers open before their insect pollinators come out, and birds return from migration too late to find their usual bug meals. Detailed study of ecological mismatch requires equally meticulous observations of historical timing—and a Boston University lab has found a trove in the journals Henry David Thoreau kept in Massachusetts in the mid-1800s. “They’re probably the oldest detailed records of flower and bird-migration times in the United States,” says Richard Primack, a conservation biologist who runs the BU lab. The diaries, together with more recent data, reveal an ecological system in flux.

1. Leaves appear earlier

In 2012, plants leafed out a full month early in some parts of the Northeast, as measured by satellite images that document levels of foliage. Scientists attribute the premature greening to abnormally warm weather.

2. Cherry trees bloom earlier too

More than 1,200 years of cherry-blossom records for Kyoto, Japan, show a trend toward earlier blooms in the past 100 years.

3. Flowers precede birds

Nearby Boston delivers extra heat to Concord, making the town a case study for global warming in the Northeast. Wildflowers [pink] seem to respond to the new spring temperatures more than migrating songbirds do [green].

4. Birds lag behind bugs

In Concord, insects, too, have responded to warming at a different rate. The BU lab has measured how many days each spring indicator shifts per Fahrenheit degree of warming [boxes]—though individual species vary [bars].

5. The future is uncertain

The wildflowers in Concord bloomed three weeks earlier in 2012 than they did in the 1850s, when Thoreau observed them. Ecologists see three possible futures for how spring may continue to evolve.

Spring temperatures are an average of March, April, and May, except the bird trend line, which is March and April.

This article originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of Popular Science.